Over at Six Colors, Jason Snell tells us that congress wants to tinker with the COVID-19 tracking framework set up by Apple and Google. Why not? What could go wrong? The same people who brought you the Government Healthcare Website, the botched and confused response to COVID-19, and, of course, the DMV want to try their hand at designing a secure, privacy protecting health tracking application. They seem sure that Apple and Google could use the help.
You don’t have to be a cynic or a fortune teller to predict that what this will mean in practice is that the privacy guarantees will be weakened in the name of getting more data. Local and federal health officials all want as much data as they can get so that they can more effectively track the spread of the virus. That’s a legitimate desire but it can’t come at the cost of a robust privacy guarantee.
I say that not as a privacy absolutist but as a pragmatist. Americans are famously curmudgeonly and suspicious of government intrusions into their business. As Snell points out, there’s a very real danger that privacy concerns will cause a significant number of Americans to opt out of participating in the program resulting in less data and probably rendering the program ineffective. As nice as it would be for various congressmen to see their names on legislation aimed at combating COVID-19 perhaps they could leave this one alone.